blogs

Today the Washington Post announced they were starting a new blog today devoted to covering think tanks. Sure, why not? It strikes me that this is a good idea. Then I read the rest of the press release:

Think Tanked comes to The Post after first launching on thinktankedblog.com by independent journalist Allen McDuffee in the spring of 2010. At The Post, McDuffee will bring to Think Tanked even more original reporting, in addition to interviews with think tank scholars, updates and summaries of think tank reports, book reviews, daily round-ups and more.

Allen McDuffee is a New York-based politics writer. Part reporter, part investigative journalist, part blogger, Allen has written for The Nation, Huffington Post, AlterNet, Raw Story, New York Observer, In These Times and Truthdig, among others.

Emphasis added. The Nation? AlterNet? Raw Story? Truth Dig? Those are decidedly left-wing outlets. Can you imagine the post hiring anyone from, say, World Net Daily? Because that's about the right-wing equivalent of some of those publications.

For those who thought the end of the Bush Administration spelled doomsday for the neoconservative movement, think again.

According to a May report (pdf) from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC think tank, neoconservatives associated with prominent figures like former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and pundit Richard Perle are still broadly active, despite policy failures associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Another War We Can’t AffordThe neo-cons may be coordinating with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and all the usual suspects to build enough public support to bomb Iran

Is there any reason at all that the American Enterprise Insitutute or anyone at any right-of-center think tank should answer McDuffee's phone calls and expect to be treated fairly? Perhaps McDuffee will prove critics wrong, but the the evidence suggests otherwise.

Robert Darnton on the secret history of the blog.

Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.

This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.

To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Postand the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as “the Reverend Bruiser”) and the Reverend William Jackson (known as “Dr. Viper”) packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes. Much of it came from a bountiful source: the coffee house.